2/ Why did Kubrick want to make The Shining ?
"I've always been interested in ESP (1) and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I'm sure we've all
had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we're looking
for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone.
But The Shining didn't originate from any particular desire to do a film
about this. The manuscript of the novel was sent to me by John Calley, (2) of Warner Bros. I thought it was one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: "Jack must be imagining these things because he's crazy". This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing.

(5) Witchcraft. In The Shining, it seems to be males who have the power
to "shine", a supernatural ability which could be likened to witchcraft.
Witch stories, of course, can go either way - they can be sympathetic to
the victims of evil witches or to the unfair victims of witchhunts -
pagans and various unpopular eccentrics. Arguably, The Shining plays it both
ways - Jack persecutes Danny because Danny "shines", but Jack's
hallucinations or communication with the spirit world also designates
him as evil sorcerer. The fate of North America's first "pagans" hangs
over the film's proceedings providing an important context, if not a
subtext.

(6). Vampires. Well, I don't mean to judge a book by its cover, but take
a look at Lloyd the bartender! Here the reversal is that it is the
vampire doling out fluids. When Delbert Grady tries to recruit Jack as
his successor, this strikes me as akin to the epidemic dynamic that
seems to be central to vampire stories. If ghost stories find horror in
death, werewolf stories in our animal nature, Frankenstein stories in
technology and witchcraft in other religions (i.e. magic, secret
knowledge, unfamiliar science), then vampire stories find horror in
disease. The remoteness of the Overlook Hotel echoes that of Dracula's
castle, with the reversal that it has the sense of being in to the west,
not the east.

(7) The Devil. "I'd sell my goddamn soul for a glass of beer." Jack
makes a Faustian bargain with the Hotel.

(9) The Psychopath. A more modern theme: Stephen King complained that
Kubrick changed Jack Torrance from a good man destroyed by alcoholism
into someone who was bad from the start. But the other side of this is
there is one more layer to the onion. To find that one's spouse or
parent is hollow - there is a basic kind of horror associated with that.

As Johnson tells it: "Kubrick was thinking of making either the Stephen King or my
novel, "The Shadow Knows." And, you know, he ultimately decided on the King. "The Shadow Knows" had some problems like being a first person narrative, the only other one that I've done actually . . . well, almost . . . and, but anyway, he and I, in talking about it got along better than he and Stephen King, I guess. (Laughs). So, he just . . . he would call me up for about a week or two. It's very much a story that other of his writers tell. You know, you get these calls from Kubrick and then he proposes a
meeting, and then he proposes you come in and write a script. And, so I did. And I spent, oh, I don't know, a couple of months . . . I guess eleven weeks all together, so almost three months in London, working everyday with him." (2)

Kubrick was also interested in Johnson because he learnt that she was giving a course at the University of California at Berkeley on the Gothic novel and could bring a scholarly knowledge of literary horror to the script. He called her the ideal collaborator for The Shining .
Note
(1) See question 16 of the FAQ for more information on the Shadow Knows.

After playing to what Movie Comment calls "generally bad reviews and
erratic box-office in America," the film was preview-tested before its
opening in London and a further twenty-five minutes were cut.

Scenes cut from the international version:

(1) Part of Jack's interview at the Overlook Hotel.

(2) Danny's examination by a doctor (Anne Jackson)

(3) Part of the tour of the Overlook with Ullman, Jack and Wendy,
including the dialogue in the Colorado Lounge and The beginning of the
scene where Ullman shows Jack and Wendy the hotel grounds and the scene leading up to Dick Hallorann's first appearance where Ullman shows off "The Gold Room"

(4) Part of Danny's conversation alone with Hallorann

(5) The end of the Torrances' first scene in the hotel, when Wendy
brings Jack his breakfast

(6) Immediately after the scene in which Wendy and Danny explore the
maze, a sequence has been cut in which Wendy is seen working in the
kitchen while a TV announcer talks of a search in the mountains for a
missing woman

(7) THURSDAY title card

(8) Wendy and Danny watching the Summer of '42 on television.

(9) dialogue from the middle of the scene in which Jack first goes to
the Gold Room

(10) Wendy is seen crying and talking to herself about the possibility
of getting down the mountain in the snowcat, and of calling the Forest
Rangers

(11) Dick Hallorann again tries to get through to the Overlook by
calling the Ranger station.

(12) 8AM title card

(13) Hallorann asks a stewardess what time they are due to land in
Denver; she tells him 8.20 and he checks his watch. Jack is seen
typing in the lounge of the Overlook. Hallorann's plane lands at the
airport. Larry Durkin (Tony Burton), a garage owner, answers his phone and talks to Hallorann, who asks for a snowcat to get up to the
Overlook.

Wendy, Danny and later Halloran are all seen watching television -- they
are all comfortable living in the electronic age. Wendy is also shown
greatly enjoying the use of the CB radio and the human contact it
affords. Danny and Halloran's "shining" gift emulates the
empathy-enhancing properties of the television-dominated world.
"Telepathy" is what we experience when we effectively communicate with each other by non-verbal means.

Jack is associated with the age of print both by his connection with his
typewriter and having been a school-teacher. (Reading and writing has to be taught.) Jack is also associated with linear "left-brain"
abstracting-rather-than-integrating "rationality" by his unhinged tirade
against Wendy after she sees his "assembly-line" manuscript. "Do you
know what a contract means?!", I think is one of the lines he used.

1. The climactic discovery of Jack's "All work and no play..."
manuscript can be taken as a metaphor for the horror of Gutenberg
technology - the typographic mass production of words on a page.
2. Television and other electric forms of communication appear through
film and are associated with Wendy, Danny and Hallorann whereas Jack
lives with his typewriter. Wendy, Danny and Hallorann watch TV,
Hallorann uses the telephone twice and Wendy seems to particularly enjoy using the two-way radio. For the good guys, communication is
community-preserving, whereas for Jack it is a way of establishing
identity, even isolation - if he can succeed as a writer, then he afford
to live the lonely life of a writer.

3. Jack represents book culture not only as an aspiring writer but also
as a former schoolteacher. His disdain for television is shown in the
sarcastic way he says (in the car) "It's OK, he saw it on television!"
By contrast, he makes a sanctimonious appeal to a "written contract"
when Wendy suggests that they should leave the Overlook Hotel in order
to get help for Danny.

4. The theme of telepathy is central to the story; McLuhan often said
that the non-verbal communication afforded by electronic media was a
kind of telepathy. Communication with images instead of words.

5. Another central theme is reincarnation. The Indian Burial Ground
motif is one that Kubrick added to the story. Bill Blakemore has drawn
connections between the murders in the hotel and the genocidal heritage
of the Americas, but parallels between the Native American notion of
Vision Quests and modern day ESP are suggestive of McLuhan's "Global Village" notion of electric technology "re-tribalizing" man after
Gutenberg technology has created nations of individualists.

6. The title "The Shining" can be taken as a metaphor for electronic
media. The name of the Overlook Hotel is suggestive of McLuhan's theory of sense-ratios and how media affect them - Gutenberg technology makes us over-look and under-listen.

7. The yellow poster (and album cover) for the movie resembles the
dot-matrix of a television screen. McLuhan made much of the
low-definition image aspect of television.

(1) The profusion of Indian motifs that decorate the hotel, and serve as
background in many of the key scenes represent the fate of the Indians
in the USA, woven into the very fabric of the country although denied a
voice.

(2) the insertion of two lines, early in the film, describing how the hotel was built on an Indian burial ground.

(3) The Calumet baking powder cans, in the food store, with their Indian chief logo that Kubrick placed carefully in the two food-locker scenes. (A calumet is a peace pipe.)

(4) Blakemore calls these observations "confirmers" such as puzzle-makers often use to tell you you're on the right track. He goes onto say, "The Shining is also explicitly about America's general inability to admit to the gravity of the genocide of the Indians -- or, more exactly, its ability to "overlook" that genocide. Not only is the site called the Overlook Hotel with its Overlook Maze, but one of the key scenes takes place at the July 4th Ball. That date, too, has particular relevance to American Indians. That's why Kubrick made a movie in which the American audience sees signs of Indians in almost every frame, yet never really sees what the movie's about. The film's very relationship to its audience is thus part of the mirror that this movie full of mirrors holds up to the nature of its audience."

Michel Foucault (2) articulated this characteristic of the maze in his 1962 essay 'Such a Cruel Knowledge' "To enter the gates of the maze," Foucault said "is to enter a theatre of Dionysian (3) castration, is
to undergo a paradoxical initiation not to a lost secret but to all the
sufferings of which man has never lost the memory - the oldest cruelties
in the world."

When Jack Torrence is trapped in the maze he ultimately takes on the characteristics the
Minotaur thus any specificity attached to his murderous actions is
removed of context, and occupies instead in the universal space of myth. Symbolically the maze transcends physical time and space, and the roar of Torrence's rage
echoes down its myriad pathways to connect right back to the origins of
rage itself.

(4) GS: This seems, frankly, an incorrect reading. To identify the 'dark side of human nature' with 'evil' is far too simplistic. I have always taken the Labyrinth in various myths to be relating to what Freud later termed the Unconscious. We see it again with Virgil's Aeneid (Orpheus' descent into the Underworld) and later in Dante, with his descent with Virgil through the Circles of Hell. Nietzsche develops the theme superbly and subtly in Also Sprach Zarathustra, where he talks at length of this need to 'Go Under', as opposed to being a religious ascetic, as a part of a necessary journey in 'overcoming' one's baser animal desires. But all this seems a long way from the maze in The Shining! (back)